By Mike Pflanz
The Islamist widow of 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay has been a fugitive since 2011 and suspected of masterminding a number of terrorist attacks
A foreign woman, thought to be Samantha Lewthwaite, reportedly paid for two Kenyan policemen to escort her in a rented four-wheel-drive from the island resort of Lamu to the border Photo: AP
Kenyan police were on Tuesday night investigating claims that a white woman seen trying to cross into Somalia could have been Samantha Lewthwaite, the British widow of a July 7 bomber and now the world’s most wanted woman.
A foreign woman reportedly paid for two Kenyan policemen to escort her in a rented four-wheel-drive from the island resort of Lamu to the border, where she attempted to pass through Kenyan immigration and into Somalia.
Police sources denied that the woman matched any description of Lewthwaite, on the run since 2011 when she fled Kenya after police uncovered a terror cell she allegedly ran in the coastal city of Mombasa.
“The documents she used to try to cross the border do not match Samantha,” Leonard Omollo, the Lamu county police commander told Kenyan media.
Anti-terror police sources in Nairobi, the capital, said that there was no indication that the white woman spotted in the vicinity of the border in April was Lewthwaite.
“She is long-gone, in Somalia, perhaps, or Tanzania, we don’t know, but we do know that even she would not be stupid enough to return to Kenya then hire police officers to try to help her escape again into Somalia,” one said.
There was no explanation, however, of who the woman could have been. She was reported to have claimed to work for an aid agency, but almost all international charities have declared the area off limits.
She was said to have “vanished” after border guards and immigration officials refused her entry into Somalia.
She had said she had a package that she needed to deliver to Kenyan troops stationed in southern Somalia as part of international armies battling al-Shabaab.